1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for obtaining aircraft state data and, more particularly, to systems and methods for obtaining aircraft state data from multiple data links.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current merging and spacing designs based on Automatic Dependent Surveillance—Broadcast (ADS-B) data are performance limited by the aircraft parameters that are available from the designated traffic to follow ADS-B data set. Performance of the merging and spacing operation can be improved significantly by incorporating additional aircraft parameters from the traffic to follow into the design. This would require the addition of these new aircraft parameters in the traffic to follow ADS-B output. Since there is a restriction on the bandwidth of the 1090 Mhz frequency used for transmitting ADS-B data, providing the new ADS-B data parameters would violate the standard limitation. Since eventually all aircraft will be transmitting ADS-B continuously, the addition of even one new parameter to the ADS-B data set will result in significantly more messages that need to be sent on the frequency periodically. Additionally, due to the fact that each aircraft transmits its data asynchronously, an increase in the number of parameters that are transmitted by all aircraft will increase the probability that two aircraft transmit a message simultaneously, resulting in both messages being unreadable by other aircraft.